Rounwytha

Some Notes On The Rounwytha Way

The Rounwytha Way – one of the three O9A praxises {1} – is the most neglected part of the Order of Nine Angles (O9A/ONA) weltanschauung, with such neglect contributing to the basal misunderstanding of the O9A itself that exists not only among self-professed modern occultists and satanists but also among academics interested in or researching what is often termed modern esotericism.

The Rounwytha Way – also known as ‘the rouning’ – is an aural pagan esoteric tradition, indigenous to a particular rural area of the British isles, of a few empaths (most of whom were and are women) for whom there are no teachings, no dogma, no rituals, no spells, no conjurations, no incantations, no abstract determinate seasons {2} and no unnatural division between ‘us’, as mortals, and Nature and ‘the heavens’ beyond; evident as such an unnatural division is in positing, and then naming, separate divinities and supernatural beings. There are therefore no gods, no god, and no goddess; no ‘demons’ or named ‘familiars’. Instead, there is a very individual and always wordless awareness, an intuitive apprehension, arising from a natural gift (a natural talent) or from that faculty of empathy that can be cultivated – according to tradition – by a person undertaking to live alone in the wilderness for around six months and then, some years later, undertaking to live alone for a lunar month in a darkened cave or some subterranean location {3}.

In essence, the Rounwytha Way is a manifestation – a presencing – of the muliebral, especially the ‘acausal knowing’ that arises from empathy with Nature and ‘the heavens’. As Myatt has explained in respect of the muliebral:

“What is muliebral cannot be embodied in some organization or movement, or in some -ism, or in any causal form – and certainly cannot be expressed via the medium of words, whether spoken or written – without changing it, distorting it, from what it is into some-thing else. For the muliebral by its very φύσις is personal, individual, in nature and only presenced in the immediacy-of-the-moment, and thus cannot be the object of a supra-personal aspiration and thus should not be ‘idealized’ or even be the subject of an endeavour to express it in some principles or principles (political or otherwise), or by some axiom or axioms, or by some dogma. For all such things – forms and words included – are manifestations, a presencing, of what is, in φύσις, masculous and temporal. Or, expressed more simply, the muliebral presences and manifests what is a-causal – what, in the past, has often inclined us to appreciate the numinous – while the masculous presences and manifests what is causal, temporal, and what in the past has often inclined us toward hubris and being egoistic.” {4}

The Rounwytha Way also re-presents that personal perceiveration that an individual pursuing a life-long mystical quest, such as The Seven Fold Way, may discover beyond The Abyss:

“The wisdom acquired, the ﬁnding of lapis philosophicus during the penultimate stage of the Way – means two particular things, and always has done. (i) living in propria persona, in a private manner and sans all posing, all rhetoric, all pomposity, all ideations; and (ii) having an appreciation, an awareness (sans words, ritual, thought) of what is now sometimes known as the acausal – of Nature, the Cosmos, of the connexions that bind life and thus of the illusion that is the individual will, and which illusion sillily causes a person to believe ‘they’ are or can be ‘in control’. These two things form the basis of a particular and reclusive way of life of a particular type of person: the type known, in one locality, as the rounerer of The Rouning.” {5}

This personal perceiveration is of the nameless, wordless, unity beyond our mortal, abstract, ideations of ‘sinister’ and ‘numinous’, of Left Hand Path and Right Hand Path, and also – and importantly – of ‘time’. For it is our ideation of ‘time’ – with its assumption of a possible temporal progression, via various temporary causal forms, toward something ‘better’ or more ‘advanced’ or more ‘perfect’ (in personal or supra-personal terms) – that underlies the magian/patriarchal/masculous approach that has dominated, and still dominates, Western occultism and esotericism in general, fundamental to which is a hubriatic egoism: “the illusion that is the individual will”.

Aspects of the abyssal perceiveration – of the apprehension discovered by someone reborn beyond The Abyss – are (i) the need to balance the masculous with the muliebral; (ii) ‘the aeonic perspective’; (iii) the importance of esoteric languages (manifest, by the O9A, in Esoteric Chant and The Star Game); and (iv) aeonic sorcery.

The aeonic perspective, for instance, provides an understanding of aeonic sorcery:

(i) Of the limitation – and the ‘mortality’ – of all causal forms and why, in respect of certain aeonic goals, it is (α) the cumulative decades and centuries long alchemical (inner) change of individuals individually (via pathei-mathos), and (β) mythoi, and (γ) ‘numinous symbols’, which are of primary importance. For it is such things which presence, over long durations of causal ‘time’, that acausal energy which is the genesis of a genuine evolution, of those changes that endure beyond each mortal and beyond all collocations of mortals (corralled, for example, via ‘empires’, States, nations, ideologies, or by some leader or by some cause or political party).

(ii) Of why and how each human being – each mortal – is but a nexion and thus can, via esoteric mimesis, restore or alter (in particular ways) what others may have, through causal forms or via their living, temporarily changed.

Rounwytha and O9A – Difference and Similarities

The ‘acausal knowing’ of the Rounwytha – of the particular type of sorceress that the Rounwytha is – wordlessly, and in a pagan way, encompasses the esoteric knowing that the O9A describe by the term aeonic perspective. But instead of the ‘aeonic sorcery’ of the O9A (and thus in place of a sinister/aeonic dialectic and a particular esoteric strategy and certain tactics) there is only a concern with what is familial and local or communal, so that for the Rounwytha

“there is no interest in, no concern with, matters beyond one’s family, one’s local area of dwelling, and beyond such problems of one’s neighbours that they personally bring to one’s attention because they may require some help or assistance.” {6}

Furthermore, there may have been in the past an act – as according to some aural accounts there may have been a rare recent incident – whereby it was considered necessary to restore the balance that some particular person, or some deed or deeds, or some natural occurrence, had in their local area upset, and thus why occasionally and in respect of some rotten person,

“why their removal – by exile or by cull – would end (cure) the sickness, restore the balance their rotten deeds and they themselves had caused to be upset, restoring thus the natural ﬂow, and gifts, of Life: of health, fecundity, happiness, good fortune.” {6}

For the Rounwytha Way is a very individual one rooted in a particular rural area, and one which occasions certain natural and necessary responsibilities and duties to certain others in the same locality. A Way which continues, and manifests, what the pagan weltanschauung – at least in Europe – anciently embodied: an intuitive/empathic understanding of ourselves and of our local rural community as an affective and effective connexion to Life {7} and a connexion that needed no god, no named gods or goddess, no ‘prayers’, and no rites or rituals: only those wordlessly left personal offerings to the (always un-named) gods/divinities, and the natural ability of an empathic sorceress (or, more rarely, a sorcerer) to foresee/foreknow and to intuitively/empathically (and thus wordlessly) know how to restore (often via memesis) the natural balance that some mortal, or some natural occurrence, had temporarily upset. This is the understanding of personal, and communal, fortune and misfortune being a gift: a manifestation, to we mortals, of how Nature and ‘the heavens’ work and of who and what and why we mortals are, as beings temporarily presenced on this planet we call Earth.

However, in essence it is this ancient paganus understanding and knowing – with its empathic awareness of a possible ‘afterlife’ beyond our temporarily presencing as an often egoistic individual – which suffuses the O9A, and indeed which re-presents the O9A weltanschauung, beyond the polemics, beyond the propaganda, the incitement; beyond the causal form of ‘satanism’, beyond (and the genesis of) its japes and Labyrinthos Mythologicus and mythos and sinister dialectic. And an understanding and knowing re-presented, most obviously, in its hermetic Seven Fold Way and its apprehension of the sinisterly-numinous, for the O9A, via its praxises, requires

“the individual to develop a perception, an understanding, a knowledge – acquired from a personal experience – beyond causal abstractions/forms and thus beyond denotatum; that is, and for example, beyond the illusion of conflicting/ideated opposites, beyond naming/denoting/words, beyond abstract morality, beyond dogma/ideology, beyond the simple principle of causation, and beyond the simplicity of a posited dialectical process.” {8}

R. Parker
2014

Footnotes

{1} Regarding O9A praxises, qv. R. Parker, Some Advice For Neophytes Regarding The Order of Nine Angles. e-text 2013. For details of the Rounwytha Way, qv. the pdf compilation (written by Anton Long) entitled The Rounwytha Tradition, which contains the following texts: (i) The Rounwytha In History and Modern Context; (ii) Denotatum – The Esoteric Problem With Names, and (iii) Alchemical Seasons and The Fluxions of Time.

{2} qv. the Esoteric Dating and Aural Traditions section of the essay Denotatum – The Esoteric Problem With Names.

{3} qv. the Camlad Rite of The Abyss which is the O9A’s somewhat updated version of the traditional rite. Aural tradition relates that, centuries ago, a certain place near what is now the town of Bridgnorth was occasionally used. Another such place once existed near Little Wenlock, while old mine workings near the Stiperstones were also sometimes used.

The traditional Rounwytha rite is given in the appendix below.

{4} Some Questions For DWM. e-text, 2014.

{5} Anton Long, The Enigmatic Truth. e-text, December 2011 CE. As I mentioned in my essay Myatt, The Septenary Anados, And The Quest For Lapis Philosophicus:

“The term in propria persona […] has a long literary and scholarly usage beyond its more recent legal connotations (legal connotations which someone searching the internet will ﬁnd and assume describe the meaning of the term). The literary and scholarly usage includes the sense of someone speaking ‘in propria persona’, as opposed (for example) to ‘the passive voice’. Thus, someone living ‘in propria persona’ would suggest something to the intelligentsia, as the above quotation would.”

{6} The Rounwytha Way In History and Modern Context, n.d. but c. 2011

{7} As mentioned elsewhere, the O9A – et al – make a distinction between affective and effective change(s). Symbolically understood, affective change is an acausal – an a-temporal – change, and one whose genesis is or can be sorcery: i.e. a presencing of acausal energy via a nexion, be that nexion an individual, or some manufactured form (such as an archetype or mythos) or some esoteric technique (such as Esoteric Chant or The Star Game).

{8} R. Parker, The Sinisterly-Numinous O9A. e-text, 2013.

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AppendixThe Rounwytha Rite

The traditional Rite begins at the ﬁrst full moon following the beginning of a propitious alchemical season – in the Isles of Britain this was traditionally the ﬁrst rising of Arcturus in the Autumn. The Rite, if successful, concludes on the night of the following full moon.

The Rite ideally occurs in an isolated underground cavern where or near to where water ﬂows, and in which location the candidate dwells alone for the whole lunar month, taking with them all that is required for the duration of the Rite. Ideally, the water should be suitable for drinking. If such an underground cavern cannot be found, then a suitable alternative is an isolated dark cave – with, if necessary, its entrance suitably screened to avoid an ingress of light.

The only light is from candles (housed in a lantern) and the only food is bread and cheese. The food and/or the water required for the duration can be either brought by the candidate at the beginning of the Rite, or provided and left (without any contact being made) on a weekly basis by a chosen member of their family kindred or by their mentor if they have one. [In modern times, certain stipulations have been added: No means of communication with the outside world should be brought; no timepiece, mechanical or otherwise, is allowed; and no modern means of reproducing music or any other means of personal entertainment are allowed.]

The candidate should arrange for a trusted person to enter the cavern at the next full moon to return them to the world of living mortals.

The traditional Rounwytha rite has no structure, and simply involves the candidate living alone in such a location for a lunar month.